


of boys with bloody knuckles and girls with razor teeth

by kinsugi_jess



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Vanya Hargreeves, Character Study, Dark Vanya Hargreeves, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Original Character(s), Not Incest If You Understand TUA, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, POV Number Five | The Boy, Possibly Unrequited Love, Protective Number Five | The Boy, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02, Soft Number Five | The Boy, Superpowers, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Vanya Hargreeves is a Badass, but he definitely has some issues, five and vanya fix their shit together bc they're the dream team, five is not a robot, soft, tbh it's not very shippy but the fiveya dynamic is definitely there, the other hargreeves are there but not very important, the sparrow academy are all ocs because i didn't know about s3 when i wrote this, they're pretty cool tho imo i like them, tw for the author's note
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:08:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28786209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinsugi_jess/pseuds/kinsugi_jess
Summary: And then it hits him what she’s done. She’s just effectively isolated herself from her one true friend in the house for the entire rest of the week. Five won’t be able to rant about Luther and Diego, tell her stories of Allison’s crazy fanboys, or sneak her extra dessert after dinner. They won’t be able to curl up together in the night, him whispering equations in her ears as she drifts off, or read books side by side. She won’t have a companion at all.And she’s done it on purpose. To get back at him. Because the isolation may hurt her, but they both know it will hurt him even more.Or: Vanya has always been strong. It just takes some time for everyone, including Five, to see it.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 11
Kudos: 118





	of boys with bloody knuckles and girls with razor teeth

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Note: if you don't want to read the author ramble a bit, feel free to skip.**
> 
> When I first got into TUA, I was immediately drawn to Vanya and fiveya. I was properly obssessed for some time, and I had a lot of love for the amazing art and fics that were drawn by the fandom.
> 
> However, somewhere along the line, the fandom seemed to change. I used to check the fiveya fic tag nearly everyday, and all the sudden every fic was a dark fic that seemed to romanticize rape and abuse. As someone who's seen many people close to me live with the effects of abuse, I very quickly felt uncomfortable in the fandom. When I posted my thoughts, a fiveya shipper whom I considered a friend lashed out and then refused to speak to me again.
> 
> After that, I basically said "fuck this" and dipped.
> 
> But honestly? Even though I'm no longer in the fandom, fiveya has stuck with me. And long after I left the fandom, a little voice in the back of my brain urged me to keep writing this.
> 
> So I did. And now it's here, to be read by you. Enjoy!

_i._

The first time Five realizes that his dear little sister isn’t so helpless is when they’re twelve years old, and Five, as usual, is being a bit of a dick.

It isn’t entirely his fault.

Reginald is on the warpath, ever since the academy barely defeated a rather low-brow villain a couple of cities over.

The mission was practically a comedy of errors. Allison got hurt right away, which threw Luther off his game for the rest of the time. 

(Some Number One he was, if you asked Five.)

Klaus was high off his ass, and Ben was just trying to keep him from getting killed in his drug-induced haze. That left Five and Diego to work together to rescue the hostages.

They did, of course, because Reginald didn’t train them every waking moment for them to be _total_ fuck ups, but it was too close and they know it. Every reporter on the scene afterward makes a point to mention how, if they’d been even a minute later, the entire family of captives would have died.

Needless to say, the shouting that follows that mission is deafening, and the usual punishments follow. Allison gets a bruise on her face that matches the one the villain’s fist left on her throat. Klaus is thrown in the downstairs closet: a cramped, spiderweb-infested hole in the wall that has been his punishment room for as long as Reginald has realized he’s claustrophobic. And everyone else trains.

“So this kind of embarrassment never happens again,” he says, just like every other time they’ve been less than perfect.

It’s ten p.m. when Five, the last one in the training room, is finally allowed to leave.

As he walks back up the stairs to their rooms, he has a sudden desire to visit Vanya. He usually tries to avoid the rest of their siblings after training, but she’s different from the rest of them. She’s the only one patient enough to really listen when he talks about his equations, and though it isn’t easy for her to keep up, she’s gotten better over the years.

As he gets closer to her door, he can hear the faint sounds of her violin drifting through the halls. He typically enjoys the sound of her practicing, an even-toned and expected melody to work to. Now, however, it just pisses him off in a way that he knows is irrational.

She doesn’t deserve his snapping just because she’s doing something she enjoys rather than waiting on him for hours on end. Still, Five has never claimed to be the most rational person. Analytical, yes. Brilliant, without a doubt. But rational? Not always.

The music stops when he thrusts open her door, and then her brown eyes are gazing up at him, curious. He throws himself onto her bed, opening his mouth to speak, but she just begins again, starting where she left off.

“Vanya,” he growls.

“Just a second,” she murmurs. “I’ve almost got this part. I’m so close….”

“Vanya!” he snaps, using his mostly depleted energy to flash over to her. “Can you stop for a goddamn minute? The mission went terrible.”

She nods sympathetically, but doesn’t stop. “In just a second,” she repeats. “This is important.”

Five’s eyes burn holes into her. “Important? I’m only talking about dozens of people nearly dying tonight. You think your music is more important than that?”

Abruptly the music stops, a sharp note filling the room and then dropping into dead air. Vanya’s hands are very still except for a slight tremor, and she evenly leans her violin against her wall.

“Five, get out of my room.”

“W-What?”

Her defiance is so unexpected that he honest-to-god stutters.

She faces him again, clenching her fists. “I said, get out of my room. I’ll talk to you on Saturday.”

Saturday? It’s only Wednesday, and they meet up every night when Reginald is asleep and Grace is turned off.

“Vanya--”

“I know you don’t care about my music,” she hisses. “Nobody in this house does. But I do. My violin is just as important to me as your missions are to you, and you _do not_ get to act like everything I love is useless and everything you love is important. That’s not fair.”

“Vanya, you’re-- you’re being ridiculous! I never said--”

_“Just get out!”_

Five flinches at her volume, instinctively looking to the staircase nearby for any trace of Reginald creeping up them.

“Vanya, you’ll bring Dad if you keep--”

“I said get out! Leave!”

There’s no mistaking what she’s doing now. Her voice echoes throughout the room and travels to the hallway, and then the sound of Reginald’s footsteps approaches.

“Vanya, what did you--”

“Number Five!” It barely takes a minute for Reginald to be at the doorway, looking disapprovingly at the two of them. “What’s the meaning of this?”

Vanya looks down at her shoes, leaving Five to answer.

“I just wanted to talk to her for a second before bed,” he says, his jaw set.

Reginald scowls. “You both know the rules. There is to be no socializing after your bedtime, especially not after training. Number Five, you are to stay away from Number Seven for the remainder of the week. I will see to it that Grace and Pogo keep you two apart.”

Reginald’s critical eyes roam over Vanya and the violin near her feet. “Stop your music, now. You’ll have plenty of time to practice tomorrow, when you’re not keeping your siblings from their sleep.” He glances at Five. “Or distracting them from their duties.”

He walks away briskly, confident that Five will leave after him.

Five turns back to Vanya, aiming to chew her out, perhaps, only to find her with an odd little smile on her face.

And then it hits him what she’s done. She’s just effectively isolated herself from her one true friend in the house for the entire rest of the week. Five won’t be able to rant about Luther and Diego, tell her stories of Allison’s crazy fanboys, or sneak her extra dessert after dinner. They won’t be able to curl up together in the night, him whispering equations in her ears as she drifts off, or read books side by side. She won’t have a companion at all.

And she’s done it on purpose. To get back at him. Because the isolation may hurt her, but they both know it will hurt him even more.

Slowly, he backs away, never breaking eye contact. She doesn’t look away, not like she did with Reginald. It’s a stark contrast to the shy, timid thing that she usually is. Lit only by the dim glow of her lamp, her eyes look almost black as they stare into his.

When he gets back to his room, he thinks he should be angry. Furious. How dare she rip her company away from him like someone taking a favoured toy away from a child who has misbehaved? 

He wants to be angry, truly. The dull ache of knowing he won’t see her will set in soon, he knows, and when it does, it’ll hurt more than any injury he could have acquired today.

But for now, he can break involuntarily into a wolfish grin. 

He’s spent years thinking he knows every facet of Vanya. He knows the shy, awkward Vanya who hides behind her hair when their siblings spare her a glance. He knows the surprisingly witty Vanya who joins in when he rants about how underappreciated he feels. He knows the warm, caring Vanya who would hang the stars in the sky for him if she could.

But this Vanya is different. She’s a little…. Dare he say, she’s a little bit like him. A spitfire, a clever little thing who knows her place in the house and simultaneously knows how to exploit it. A tiny, underestimated thing with fire boiling in her veins.

Yes, he should be pissed that the first glimpse of this Vanya is when she’s plotting against him. But where would the fun be in that?

This Saturday, they’re going to talk. Five is going to reveal this new facet he’s been introduced to and encourage her to unleash it more. He’s going to coax that odd smile out of her again and she’s not going to hide anything from him anymore. She’ll embrace the side of her that she’s kept hidden.

He just has to wait until Saturday.

_ii._

He gets stuck in the future that Friday.

Still, decades into the future, he learns secondhand that, despite him never being able to encourage her, this secret habit of hers continues into adulthood.

He spends his days reading and rereading her book, circling his favorite parts and underlining every mention of his name. His subsequent nights are spent imagining how she must have felt when she was writing it.

Did she smile grimly as she recalled the worst moments of their childhoods and put it on a silver platter for the world to see? Did a little part of her light up with glee when she got to subtly call out Diego and Allison’s treatment of her? What secrets were already common knowledge by that point, and which ones did she throw into the world like little grenades and then run from their impact?

Did she feel vindicated? Did strangers approach her on the street offering sympathy like hastily discarded candy? Did their siblings cry, scream, punch the walls? Did they try to confront her, only for her to bite back, “I only wrote the truth,” in the toneless way that only Vanya speaks?

His mind, so stubbornly stuck on one track, runs with this train of thought and refuses to let go.

Did she think of him when she wrote it? Obviously she must have when she wrote about him, but what about the later years? Did she wonder if he could have prevented Ben’s death, had he been there? Did she think about the promises they made to each other, that they’d run away as soon as they turned sixteen and never come back?

Was his voice in her head, whispering wry observations and biting commentary, the way hers was in his?

When he comes back, he’s far too busy to ask any of this. He abandons her quickly enough, his instinct towards going alone kicking in once again. A huge mistake, as it later turns out, because shy little Vanya has stopped taking her pills, and there’s no one to stop her when her emotions turn her into a hurricane of a woman, hellbent on the destruction of a world that never cared for her.

He wonders if it’s possible to be furious, terrified, and proud of someone all at once.

The next time they’re face to face, he’s suspended in the air, her powers draining the life out of him. He can literally feel the life leaving, all fifty odd years slipping through his fingers, and he’s never wished more to talk to Vanya than in this moment.

He’d tell her that she was never weak, never insignifiant. That, in a house where you could only get someone to listen if your fist was in their face, she’d learned to be powerful in her own right. He’d tell her how sorry he is that he left before he could encourage all of the tiny ways she rebelled against her abuse. 

He’d tell her that he spent that Tuesday night awake in bed, reliving her strange smile and planning ways to bring it out again. He’d tell her that he dreamt of that smile every night in the apocalypse, slept with her book tucked under his arm because it was the only way to feel close to her.

He’d tell her that he never should have left her so soon, either time. 

If he could just go back, he’d fix all of it, but his arrogance in his powers is what led them here, and it’s too late to go back.

Allison fires a bullet an inch from her face and Vanya collapses. The rest of the Hargreeves fall with her, and the world ends despite his best efforts. Five does the one thing he’s only ever wanted to do: he saves his family. Right before the impact, he gets them out. Including Vanya.

It’s the first time he’s saved her, and it doesn’t feel like enough.

_iii._

The next time Five sees her, she’s in a cornfield in the middle of nowhere, eyes wide and frightened.

She looks different than last time. Her skin is less palid, her eyes less haunted. He knows from Luther that she has amnesia, and it feels awful to say, but she wears that burden well. No longer does Reginald have his claws in her arm, constantly drawing her back to the past. No longer does she blend in with the walls and only smile when smiled at. 

If Five was less selfish, he’d let her stay like that. Pure, content, and untouched by the Hargreeves family curse.

But Five is a lot of things, and selfless isn’t one of them. He wants his Vanya back.

So he tells her half-truths and hopes that she’ll let herself get pulled back into the fold of their fucked up family, hopes that in her frustration, she’ll turn to him again. 

But she doesn’t.

Instead, she turns to Sissy, a sunny little farm wife with a son that Vanya can relate to. 

He curses himself for-- again-- not getting to her in time. First it was that Harold asshole, and now it’s this woman and her son. For as much of a wallflower as Vanya is, she always somehow manages to find someone to turn to in a time of need.

So she leaves him like he’s never been the center of her universe, never been her one true confidant. She leaves him like it’s easy, and then Five is on his own again.

His anger at this grows as his plans fall apart, and it all comes to a head in the middle of a country road.

“You don’t want to test me,” he grinds out.

Vanya’s hands and eyes both glow a blinding white, her jaw set.

“Funny,” she responds. “I was just about to say the same thing.”

And then she smiles, and _oh_. He recognizes that smile. He saw it last when they were thirteen and he was being sent back to his room, isolated from the one person he cared about the most. It’s the kind of smile that shouldn’t even classify as such. He knows Vanya, and he knows this smile despite its rarity. It’s a war cry. It’s a warning.

It’s the smile that makes him back down.

His plans fall apart once again, and then, just when he might have righted them again, they find themselves in another timeline.

_iv._

Now, with her memories back and her powers not out of her grasp, she’s something to behold.

She holds her own when the two academies begin to fight, but more importantly, she’s the one to stop it.

“Everyone stop!” she shouts, and then both academies, along with Reginald, are being suspended in the air.

She stares up at them, ferocity in her eyes.

“I’m going to let you go, and we’re going to talk. Just talk. If you don’t think you can talk without launching into an attack, you’ll sit the fuck down and listen to everyone else. I am so tired of everyone around me being on a warpath.”

She takes a deep breath and turns toward Reginald. “You are going to set up a room that can comfortably fit all of us, so that we can figure this out.”

Reginald goes to open his mouth, but she cuts him off. “And don’t even think about locking me up in the basement to get rid of me. You’ve done it before.” Her lips curl up humourlesly, her teeth on show. “It didn’t take.”

Everyone falls to the ground again, and Reginald reluctantly leads them to one of the back rooms that he uses only for guests. When everyone’s in, Reginald steps out, not saying why.

They get introduced to Carla, Anthony, Bay, Christopher, Dean, and Felix…. as well as this new version of Ben. Dean and Bay, numbers five and four respectively, are easily the most cooperative. Dean can release a blast of energy from his face, which has left him with more than a few burn scars on his face. Despite this, he’s nothing but cheery once the shock and urge to fight has worn off.

Bay is a tiny, curvy girl wearing dark makeup and a cloak. “For the aesthetic,” she explains, before transforming into about a dozen crows and swarming around Vanya. She transforms back with a cheeky grin.

The rest of them are less forthcoming about their abilities, so Dean and Bay decide to just introduce everyone themselves.

“Ben’s our Number One,” Bay says, with only a subtle tone of bitterness. “He can--”

“We know what he can do,” Klaus interrupts softly.

“Well, fine. Spoil the surprise,” Dean huffs. “Felix is Number Two. Super-strength, and he can draw from anyone else’s powers.”

Bay continues, “Carla is Number Three. She can heal any wound. Depending on how long someone’s been dead, she can bring them back too. Trust me, all of us have seen the light and heard the angels and what not before. Luckily, Car never lets us go all the way there.”

Carla looks at the Umbrella Academy and gives a small smile. “Death isn’t exactly a stranger to your academy either, is it?” She looks at Klaus, and then Luther, biting her lip. “No. Not a stranger at all.”

“I’m four,” Bay says. “Lucky number four. And Dean is five, because his power is cool but it has a long cool off time. He’s essentially a dead-on sniper with one bullet. Great, if you’re fighting one guy, but otherwise….”

“Anthony is Number Six. His powers are sick but not exactly….” Dean trails off, not knowing how to explain.

“He’s a human voodoo doll,” Bay takes over. “So no one can fight him without getting the shit knocked out of them too. We try not to let him get too hurt, but Dad sees it as a necessary evil.”

“She means he doesn’t care,” the boy named Anthony clarifies. “They know Dad. They know he doesn’t care.”

“And then Christopher is Number Seven,” Dean finishes up. “He’s kind of useless. No offense, man.”

The man named Christopher grimaces. “”I can turn into a cube. That’s what I do.”

Bay and Dean turn back to both academies, grinning.

Five steps forward, pointing to each sibling as he talks. “Luther, number one, super strength. Diego, two, telekinesis. Allison is three, and she can control reality using verbal commands, specifically the phrase, ‘I heard a rumour’. Klaus is four and he can see dead people. I’m Five, and my number should be self-explanatory. Ben used to be our number six, but now he’s your number one, which I’m sure we all have opinions on.”

The two groups break into frenzied chatter at that particular revelation, but the girl called Bay just looks at Vanya curiously.

“What about her?” she asks.

Five should let her explain her own powers, but he jumps in before he can stop himself.

“Vanya is number seven, but that’s only because the old man was afraid of what she could do. She can control sound waves.” There’s a note of pride in his voice that would be impossible to miss, but he carries on like he’s not revealing his heart with every word spoken. “She almost ended the world. Twice. So you can see why she isn’t scared of Dad anymore.”

Vanya smirks at that, and Five remembers, suddenly, how she once told him that she couldn’t be strong or fast but she could be brave, and that’s why Dad should let her onto the team. At the time, it had been sort of laughable. That was the year that Klaus had taken to scaring Vanya with the tales of dead ghost nannies that hovered around him, and she tended to cower. 

She never did like ghost stories, until she wrote her own.

There’s a sort of appreciative glimmer in the eyes of Dean and Bay, and the body language of the others starts to soften as well. Five knows bodies like he knows bullets, and this means that they believe them. That Reginald doesn’t have as much power over either academy as he thinks he does.

He shares a look with Vanya and steps closer.

She opens her mouth to speak.

_v._

For the next several weeks, Five devotes his time to training Vanya.

If she appreciates it, she certainly doesn’t show it.

She’s prickly and intense in every training session, and it’s even worse when any of their siblings try to join in. The barest criticisms of her control become self-fulfilling prophecies, Five’s brutal honesty sending mats and dummies flying across the room in her rage.

“Vanya!” he snaps, exasperated, and she responds by sweeping his off his feet and sending him across the room too.

She huffs when he lands, seemingly mad at him for landing so hard, and sits down on the floor.

“We’re done!” she snaps. “Dad was right. I just wasn’t meant to be a superhero. Every time this shit has worked, it’s been a fluke. Just go back to getting us home.”

Five shakes his head, picking himself up and plopping back down next to her.

“Stop it,” he says sternly.

She starts to talk, but he cuts her off. 

“Do you remember the Tuesday before I left?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yes. What about it?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” he tells her.

Her mouth twitches in a tiny smile. “I was playing my violin. I was trying to learn a song from Phantom. I was so close to getting it and then you burst in, expecting my attention. I tried to tell to give me a minute, but--”

“--I was so jazzed up from the mission that I bulldozed over you. I think I insulted you too,” he says, feigning ignorance and hoping she doesn’t notice that he remembers _everything_.

“Oh, you mean when you said I wasn’t important?”

She looks straight at him, unblinking and unabashed, her mouth twitching the only indication that she isn’t actually angry.

He lets out a wry chuckle. “Yeah, that. Don’t worry; I only spent the next four decades regretting what I said.”

Vanya blows a strand of hair out of her pink face. “It wasn’t that serious.”

“Now. At the time, you were furious. You blew up at me, but with a certain amount of grace to it. You were very precise at telling me to fuck off. And then, when I wouldn’t apologize, you yelled for Dad.”

“Not for him,” she argues. “It just needed to be anyone to get you out of there.”

“No, you knew it would be Dad,” argues, insistent that she tells the story right. “We got separated for the rest of the week. And you still did it.”

“I wanted to hurt you,” she admits.

He nods. “I knew that. And I was impressed, you know that?”

The laugh she barks out is surprised. “Really? I thought you’d be livid.”

“I was. For about two minutes. But then I realized how cunning that was, to hurt yourself to hurt me. How clever you were to do that. I was going to tell you that, too. But then I….”

“Left.”

Five lets the silence settle for a minute before he speaks again.

“What I remember about that night was how proud I felt. Even though I had nothing to do with that quiet strength I saw. It was always in you.” He looks up at her through his dark lashes, eyes fixed on her chin so he can hide from her reaction. “It still is. You’re right that you’ve never been a fighter. You’ve never had to be. But that strength makes you more incredible and dangerous than any of the assholes we call siblings.”

He nodded decisively, standing up and holding his hand out to her. “So let’s learn to use it. You’re at your best when you’re precise, deliberate, and quietly pissed. Let’s go again.”

She takes his hand.

_vi._

To say that things change after that doesn’t quite cover it.

Five knows that there’s nothing that can bring them back to the way they were when he and Vanya were both thirteen, but the conversation certainly catapulted them into something.

She gets better control of her abilities with each training session, and with each session completed, he sees the slouch in her shoulders lessen and the self-deprecating jokes die out. As their siblings gradually fuck things up in this timeline, Vanya stays by Five’s side as they figure out how to get back.

She takes to coming with him when he visits the commission, and Dot and Herb treat her with a mix of adoration and healthy fear. Each time, they get more and more comfortable with her as the four of them brainstorm ideas on how to get back to the correct timeline. One time, Dot brings up:

“And what about your body, dear? Shall we look for the calculations to get you back to your adult body?”

And Five freezes. 

Yes, of course he does. He wants to be taller than Vanya by more than half an inch, so she can look up to him. He wants to blend in seamlessly with his siblings, so strangers no longer ask which of the Hargreeves are his parents. He wants to buy alcohol by himself. He wants to get a job. He wants, in general, to be treated like a real person; not a child to be looked after or dealt with.

Deep down, he knows what it is that he wants from an adult body.

He wants Vanya to look at him.

He’s seen how she looks at men and women she finds attractive. He saw it with Harold and with the farm wife. He sees it in the present with the girl who can turn into crows and looks like a plus-sized supermodel when she’s human, and the boy who acts like a voodoo doll but looks like royalty. He sees her eyes watch them, her cheeks burn and breath stutter when Bay casually flirts with her or Anthony watches her use her powers with thinly veiled amazement.

He sees it and he hates it, despises it, because it’s out of his reach.

But if he had his adult body….

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve been working on the calculations for some time now, and I believe they’re almost perfect. Just…. not quite there.”

Herb nods serenely. “Well, you’ll get it.”

“And we’ll help you as much as we can,” Dot adds. “Just tell us what we can do.”

Five pushes down the warmth of hope rising in his chest, and sighs. “I appreciate that, but the priority right now is to get us back to our correct timeline.”

And so they get back to work.

_vii._

It takes two weeks to get back into the right timeline, and four more for Five to finally figure out the calculations.

When the four weeks are up, he’s staring into the mirror, knees locked like a deer in the headlights. It feels odd to wear his adult body without feeling the sharpness of his ribs when he breathes, or the ache in teeth that had long since rotted in his mouth after so many years.

This body is squeaky clean and perfect, like it was supposed to be. Like it should have been. He’s beyond proud to figure it out, and relieved to have it done, but it still doesn’t feel like his body.

He takes a deep breath, remembering Vanya waiting for him in the kitchen, ready to see the new (old?) Five. If his hands shake as he descends the stairs, she knows he won’t mention it, and he sure as hell won’t. He tries to keep calm, feeling foolish, like a teenage boy about to depart for prom with his date waiting downstairs.

When he steps into the kitchen, her eyes go wide, the hand holding her favorite teacup freezing in midair.

“You look….”

“Strange,” he finishes, grabbing the teacup from her and setting in on the table. “I’ve never looked like this. Without all the scars and aches and everything else. It feels like I’m wearing someone else’s skin suit.”

“Buffalo Bill,” Vanya interjects helpfully, a hint of a smirk playing on her lips.

Five rolls his eyes. “Thanks, V. Appreciate it.”

She laughs. “You brought it up!” She pushes his shoulder playfully, but her eyes are serious when they look into his. “I was going to say you look nice. Really nice. It’s like looking into a parallel universe. One where you never left.”

He doesn’t quite know what to say to that, so he merely shrugs.

“I think we’ve all had enough of parallel universes. I’ll get used to it anyway.”

He goes to take a sip of her tea, but she pushes it farther down the table with her powers, out of his reach.

“Really.”

The smirk returns twofold. “Go get it, Mr. Long Arms. Use your shiny new body.”

She’s always been funny when she’s not around the others, but she’s typically not this impish. If it were anyone else, he’d be annoyed, but he indulges her in the hopes that she’ll continue getting more confident. 

He reaches across the table, lunging, but the teacup keeps moving away from him, so fast that tea drops hit the table.

Sighing, he blinks over, only to find the teacup across the room.

“You don’t have the advantage anymore, Five,” Vanya announces smugly. “I’m deliberate, remember? I’ve also been told that I’m a great deal stronger than everyone else.”

He lets out a growl, blinking to the location of the mug, only to see it slide out of his reach again.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” he deadpans. “You let it go to your head.”

“Hmm, who does that sound like?” she hums.

Eventually, he stops pouncing on various surfaces and wraps his arms around her tightly. Just as he’d expected, her concentration drops, and the teacup clatters loudly but safely onto the table once more.

“What’s this?” she mumbles into his shoulder.

“A technique,” he answers absently, relishing the feeling of her newly short hair on his cheek.

“Distracting is a low blow,” she snips, but she lets her arms wrap loosely around his thin waist as well.

They stay like that for a moment, the serial killer and the ender of worlds, wrapped together with nothing in the world to kill them or make them kill.

He sighs, pulling away regretfully, and twists his new face into an easy grin.

“What should we do about that?”

Her brows raise, her expression confused but intrigued.

“About you…. cheating?”

“I maintain that it wasn’t cheating, it was just--”

“Cheating.”

Five steps closer. “Let me make it up to you either way. Dinner tonight? We can finally go somewhere nice without a waiter asking me if I want a kid’s menu.”

She giggles at that. “Ah, so that’s what this is really about. Celebrating your newfound ability to buy alcohol.”

“It is not,” he says indignantly. “That’s merely a perk. If it’s more of a celebration than an apology, it’s a celebration of you.”

Vanya makes a face that’s almost comically surprised. Despite the leaps and bounds in her confidence, there are still times where her insecurities shine through. If he thought he’d get away with it with no consequences from the Commission, he’d find a timeline with a living Reginald Hargreeves and kill him all over again for the meekness that still slips through Vanya’s new personality.

But he can’t, and that train of thought goes nowhere anyhow.

“Yes, you,” he tells her softly. “I’d say you changed, but you haven’t. Not really. I think you’re just more of who you’ve always been, beneath everything else. You’ve gotten more you. And that is the best reason I can think of to celebrate.”

Her eyes crinkle when she smiles, and though clearly, embarrassed, she doesn’t look away. He likes that, likes that it encapsulates everything he’s so proud of.

It’s at this moment that he wants so badly to lift her into his arms and press his mouth to hers and spin her around the kitchen, to kiss her so hard that she forgets all the years they were apart. He wants swollen lips and tangled limbs and a lot of other things that he probably shouldn’t be thinking of during an emotionally intimate moment, or maybe at all.

“If you don’t celebrate with me, I’ll just go by myself. I’ll be the drunken asshole at the corner table, and the waiters will ask me to leave, but I’ll keep teleporting around so they can’t throw me out,” he tells her, his voice very serious.

She laughs, bumps his shoulder with hers.

“I’ll be there,” she promises. “Just make the reservation. I’ll meet you there.”

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that's it.
> 
> I'm not sure if I'll ever write more for this fandom, but it makes me happy to put this out there and see if it catches anyone's fancy.
> 
> Come say hi at
> 
> jesterevermore on tumblr  
> evermore_ashley on IG  
> jesterevermore on twitter


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